


Lights

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:50:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Jaeger pilots call it ghost-drifting.   Alternatively, leaving the lights on</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lights

**Author's Note:**

> This involves bareback dubcon incest. In case the phrase "bareback dubcon incest" was not a tipoff, this is not a cheery fic about snuggles and brotherly love saving the day. 
> 
> Mostly, this is about my love of having good people do shitty things because they think it's the only option. 
> 
> Also, parts of the novelization call something like what happens here Drift hangover? But I didn't find that out until this was mostly written.

One night, you wake up and --

...

On some level, it helps to know the science. 

Every Jaeger pilot who makes it past the standardized testing and the first cut has read the manuals: Drift links pilots on an atomic level. It reaches inside the heads of pilots and starts tying certain atoms in certain neurons in Pilot A's cortex to the parallel ones in Pilot B's cortex. Tie enough of them together, and the neurons will start firing together. Fire enough neurons together, and not only do the bodies move together, but the combined nervous systems generate synchronized electrical output for the Jaeger's input interface. 

Noted in the manuals, but less explained by scientific articles available on the class website, is the fact that after repeated trips into the Drift, after time spent in the same up-up, down-down state, some of the atoms in the neurons of a correctly-patched team will spontaneously synch without a field to connect them. Across a lunch table, across a lunch room, across continents: jaeger legend says that when the left-hand pilot of Cherno Alpha cut his hand on a glass while eating dinner, the right-hand pilot dropped her glass at a state function eight hundred miles away. 

The more time a pair of pilots spends Drifting together, the more their brains start flipping switches in synch on their own. Journals call it _universe matter-memory_.

Jaeger pilots call it _ghost-drifting_. 

Alternatively, _leaving the lights on_. 

...

You read a lot of journal articles about _universe matter-memory_ , enough so that the library asks if you want to set an alert for it. You tell them you do, and after that, whenever an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal with those words, you have a copy in your electronic inbox within the hour: for a guy who managed all of one semester of college before dropping out to spend his time putting roofs on rich people houses, it's dense stuff, but you have -- well, you're driven to understand it. 

One night, maybe four months into being posted to the Lima station, you wake up, and your younger brother is pinned underneath you. You're in his bed, and you're using your forearm and body weight to keep his right shoulder on the mattress. Your tongue is maybe two inches into his mouth, and he is struggling, but not because he wants you to off him: he is fighting you because he wants you to stop kissing him, so that he can turn over and rub his ass against your dick. 

Both of you are hard. Raleigh's eyes are still closed, but when you fall over yourself, trying to get off him, they open.

...

The second time is -- how long later? Weeks? Days? You wake sitting bolt upright in bed, legs off the edge and you wake because you feel hair under your hands. You have a vague sense of having been out drinking the night before. Music. Dancing. Good times. Did you come home with someone? You think so. Broad shoulders, short hair. Your eyes are closed, and you move your hands over bare skin, then bring your hand back to the back of the head. The tongue under your dick is eager even if not exactly practiced, and you realize you're sitting upright. How are you sitting upright while getting morning head?

You open your eyes, and you realize Raleigh is kneeling in front of you, eyes closed, cheeks hollow, lips tucked over his --

...

"Listen, man, there have got to be some empty bunks I can crash in," Raleigh says to Tendo. 

They're eating in the canteen, and Raleigh is gesturing with his fork. Tendo blinks at him, then blinks at you, standing at the end of the table with your tray in both of your hands. 

"My little brother even Drifts loud," you say, sitting down next to Tendo. Tendo looks from you to Raleigh, then back to you. Finally, he laughs, and and both you and Raleigh -- 

Raleigh starts crashing in one of the unused single cabins on G-deck, and then two weeks later -- 

...

Here is a memory you have of growing up: it's late summer, and you can't breathe; you can't get your right leg to work underneath you. Everything throbs, and the sunlight seems too bright. Grass prickles against your cheek, there are bugs all over the place, and you slip in and out of consciousness. It feels like hours go by, but it's probably no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Eventually, you open your eyes and see shoes that belong to your little brother. You know this because they used to be yours until you grew out of them, and they went straight from your feet to Raleigh's. 

Right now, Raleigh's voice is shaking with anger. 

He asks who beat you up. He'll kick their ass, he'll -- 

"Gravity, you dipshit," you say. "I fell out of a tree. Go for help." He is nine. You are twelve.

...

Two weeks later -- 

...

Neither of you says a waking word to the other one about it, and two weeks after that, you and Raleigh take Gipsy Danger out and kill a Category 2. Big thick head, not too fast moving, but plenty of power: the plasma cannons do their job, and the two of you come back, get out of the jaeger, make your way through the cheering crowds, then hit the showers. Raleigh makes a jackass comment about how he was the one who figured out how to get under the thing's guard, so you now owe him half of the fudge from the next care package from Ma, and the next coherent thought you have is realizing that you have your brother shoved up against the tile wall with your left hand. You're jerking him off with your right hand; your hand is slick with what you're guessing is shampoo because there's plenty of it in Raleigh's hair and smeared across his shoulders. 

You can taste shampoo in your mouth, flat and bitter. Was it from kissing him? Two, three more pulls, your hand moving before you can put together any kind of stop order, and Raleigh's eyes are wide open. His jaw is set, and every single part of his face makes it clear how much he doesn't want to -- but he --

You let go, but it's too late. 

Raleigh comes all over his stomach and your hand; even in the shower water, it feels hot on your skin, and you look down at your hand, then up at Raleigh, staring at you. You couldn't make a noise if you wanted to, and Raleigh walks out of the shower. You don't hear where he goes. Instead, you get down on your knees.

With the shower against your back, you puke straight bile into the drain and stay there until the water goes cold: it doesn't do a goddamn thing for your hard-on. 

...

What does it feel like to pilot a Jaeger? 

"You see a hurricane coming, you run," you say. 

"In a Jaeger, you can finally fight back," Raleigh says, grinning at the girl. 

This is in the early days, in Long Beach, when the ghost-drifting was a party trick and a joke. 

...

Something that makes _leaving the lights on_ worse: every time it happens, it's your younger brother on his knees, your younger brother with his mouth on your dick, your younger brother held up against the wall by you, not willing, but also not saying no because the two of you are _lit up and moving together_ , as jaeger pilots call it. 

Raleigh is younger than you by enough that you remember him being born. You remember being embarrassed when he wanted to tag along with you to hang out with his friends. You remember how, in that last semester of college where you fucked up and got kicked out of ROTC and lost your scholarship, about a month and a half before you told them that they couldn't flunk you because you were dropping out, your mother called, angry, telling you that your little fourteen year old brother had just gotten grounded for a month because his girlfriend's dad had caught him sneaking into said girlfriend's bedroom at two in the morning through an open window. He was fourteen. She was fourteen. He was half-dressed. She was completely undressed. What the hell were fourteen year old kids doing these days?

"So wait, Mom, did you ground him for doing it or for getting caugh -- "

You got an earful about that.

...

It's your younger brother on his knees, your younger brother with his mouth on your dick, your younger brother held up against the wall by you, not willing, but also not saying no because the two of you are _lit up and moving together_. You can see the Drift in his eyes and on his face and feel it in the way every muscle in his body is tight under you, but where the fuck is the light coming from, Yancy Beckett? 

Something that makes it worse: without exception, every person you've brought home from a bar in the past decade has been a guy. 

Over and over, you tell yourself the two things have nothing to do with each other.

...

For a week after the handjob in the shower, Raleigh doesn't sleep in his separate quarters. You don't see him at meals; you don't see him in the gym; you don't see him in the Kwoon Once or twice, you think you see him ducking down a hallway to avoid talking to you. You cover for him with Ma; you cover for him with Pentecost and the trainers, and when he finally surfaces one day outside your quarters with a tall brunette with legs for days and a warm laugh and a rack that Raleigh can't keep his eyes off -- he sleeps over at her place at night.

The brunette sticks around for almost two months. Then, another brunette, shorter, but with an even better rack. Then, a redhead with a sister: a townie, and then Raleigh is back with the first brunette. They've made up, Tendo tells you. 

"Everything OK between you and -- " Tendo uses his fork to indicate your brother sitting across the canteen. Him and the brunette are giggling with each other and eating off each other's trays. 

"We're fine," you say. Tendo considers you. 

"What, you don't like her?"

"I've never met her."

Fork still in hand, Tendo considers you for a long, long moment, trying to decide what, exactly, you're lying about. 

Two days later, a Category 3 surfaces. There is a mostly-empty ferry that tries to get to shore before --

...

That night --

...

When you were fifteen, you had your first boyfriend. At that time, Mom was living with an asshole whose summer gig was helping his parents run the family campground. Mostly, he drank beer and argued with your mom. You helped out by checking people in and out -- people came in with their RV's or trailers with a boat hitched up behind for Lake Tahoe, and you met a kid from Arizona who was there because his dad wanted to fish. Sandy hair, blue eyes, long, lean frame and blue swimming shorts. You'd give him free soda out of the refrigerator behind the counter, and somehow, he figured out that this meant you had a crush on him. 

The first time he touched you, you felt electricity run through you. The first time he leaned over and kissed you in the stand of pines by the generator, you thought your heart was going to stop from happiness. 

When you signed up for the Jaeger Academy, you left a boyfriend behind. From time to time to time, you used to bring a guy back. The not-so-subtle signal used to be the OCCUPIED sign hung on the doorknob to the split quarters: Raleigh showed up with it drunk one night while the two of you were posted in Manila, and it had followed the two of you from Shatterdome to Shatterdome ever since. 

...

That night, after the ferry, for the first time in months, Raleigh comes back to the shared quarters. 

He is drunk; he has a split lip and bloody knuckles. You hear him fumble with the keycard; you hear another voice outside the door. You go a little quiet on the other side of the shared quarter -- the bedrooms are separated by a connecting door, and you've been using Raleigh's side of the room for storage since he hasn't been back in weeks. You're trying to find some books that you thought you boxed up and put over here, and you hear it. More fumbling with the lock, then actual voices. 

Raleigh, sounding drunk. " -- so then I said _fuck you_ , and he said _fuck you right back_ , which is what happened, so -- " There are shuffling noises, like Raleigh is pushing boxes around. Then, the second voice:

"So you got a roommate?"

Your heart thumps once, loudly. 

That isn't --

...

You have been drinking all night, steady, methodical, working your way through a half-bottle of station-brewed moonshine. It doesn't so much as water the eyes as evaporate on touching flesh, and it just burns and burns and burns. You come through the connecting door between the bedrooms. You see that there is a man sitting on the bed. Raleigh is half-kneeling, half-straddling him, and the guy starts to get up. Raleigh doesn't move, keeps his face turned towards the wall, and the guy looks from you to Raleigh, then back to you. 

"Boyfriend?"

"Something like that," you say, mug in your hand. 

"You all right with this?"

You can't see the guy's face, but you can tell that he is a little taller than Raleigh. Not as widely built, darker hair. A little older, but not by much, and your tongue sticks to the top of your mouth. Everything above your brother's shoulders is covered by shadow; the only light in the room is a desk lamp next to the bed. Shadows, light, the bare line of Raleigh's back. Shoulders, the spine in the middle. He still has his pants on. When Raleigh turns his head a little, waiting for you to say something, you can see his mouth, swollen from being hit, but also from kissing another man.

"Yes," you say, and you sit down on a chair. 

You have a mug with contents that taste like they're roughly 75% straight ethanol and 25% engine cleaner. You drink it. 

Raleigh takes his shirt off.

...

After the kissing, they take off the rest of their clothes. After they're both naked, the guy puts Raleigh on his back in the bed. They lie on top of each other and press their bodies together, and you watch the lines of the bodies. You are drunker than you've been in years, and there is still an inch and a half of basemade moonshine in the mug. Then, Raleigh opens his eyes and says something in his ear that you don't catch. The guy props himself up on an elbow, then looks over at you.

You look back at him.

"Under the bed," you say. "There's a box." 

He doesn't ask how you know what Raleigh said to him: assumes, maybe, that the two of you set it up in advance. How much can he even see of you?

But he fishes the lube out and starts finger-fucking your brother on your bed. The first finger takes a while to go in, but it does, all the way up to the palm. Then a second. Raleigh turns over, puts his arms on the headboard and shoves his face down into his arms, and without you nagging him to go down to the barber, it's grown out long enough to fall forward. Three fingers takes a while, the guy telling him a few times to keep his knees apart, but they're in, and Raleigh makes a noise in his throat.

"I'm ready," he says.

The guy starts to reach for the box to get a condom, but Raleigh shakes his head. It's more a movement on arms, and the first time he says it, it's muffled, so he raises his head to be heard clearly.

"No," Raleigh says.

The guy looks at Raleigh, then over at you, sitting in the chair.

"You OK with that?"

You pause, simultaneously wanting and not wanting.

Then, for the second time that night, you say _yes_. 

...

Here is something that makes it worse: all the way way up to this point, neither you nor Raleigh _have the lights on_. You've woken up enough times in the middle of synch to start to recognize what it feels like -- it's subtle, nothing like going into a full Drift, but your dick has been in Raleigh's mouth enough, your tongue has been down his throat far enough that you are starting to know what it feels like, and you aren't synced. Neither is Raleigh, and you only need eyes to tell what happened tonight. You can see the split lip and the cut on his forehead.

Raleigh got drunk. Raleigh got into a fight. Then, he went and deliberately picked up a guy and got the guy to come back with him.

In fact, he didn't just bring a guy back: he brought a guy to come back to your place. That's your bed he's in. That's his shirt on the floor and your lube on his ass and on the dick that's going to be fucking him without a condom: your stomach turns over, and the guy kisses Raleigh in the small of his back, then on his shoulder blade, tells him to relax. He's tight, but it'll be fine. Is he sure he wants to do this? More lube? More fingers?

On that side of the bed, you have some photos. One of the house where you grew up, one of the first car you ever rebuilt with your own hands. One from the time you and Raleigh got flown to Paris for an award for being a group of three jaegers for services to humanity or something. Raleigh is grinning his goddamn head off, and the Eiffel Tower is in the background: what the fuck does it look like to the guy? You're visibly older than Raleigh. Raleigh has the family babyface. 

"You want to stop?" the guy asks, gently.

Raleigh turns his head, and you can actually see his face. He looks at you.

"No," he says. "I want to do this."

The guy considers him for a second, then puts a little more lube on his dick, and you watch Raleigh close his eyes and bite down on his lip.

The lights haven't been on all evening: up until this point, it's been you, sitting in a chair and Raleigh getting finger-fucked So you put down the mug, and you put your hand in your sweatpants. You put your hand on your dick, and Raleigh makes a noise in his throat when the guy pushes in. The wave of shame you feel makes you flush. 

You start to move your hand. 

Then, with full-body intensity, the lights come on, and you come so, so hard, Yancy Becket. 

...

Three weeks later, you and Raleigh and Gipsy Danger are transferred to Anchorage, and both of you are afraid to ask for separate rooms: the default for Jaeger pilots is shared quarters. 

Eight months after arriving in Anchorage, the two of you try to save a fishing boat that got caught out at sea: a joint decision, really, to turn off the comm and go after the boat in high seas. There won't be a repeat of the ferry, but effort only counts so much: by dawn, you, Yancy Becket, you are floating in the middle of a field of kaiju parts, one human fragment in a field of blue innards. A scavenger boat finds you. They have the decency to return your body to the PPDC instead of selling you in pieces to souvenir-hunters. 

Your little brother pilots the Jaeger to shore alone, and hecollapses on the sand and snow. The only word he says before losing consciousness is your name: it takes years for your little brother to forgive himself for having to learn to like it.

**Author's Note:**

> DESTRONOMICS, AMIRITE? ALL THE GOOD IDEAS IN THIS ARE HERS.


End file.
